The amount of visual media on the Internet is growing due to people sharing photos and video, and by commercial efforts in response to increasing speeds and bandwidth capabilities of the network. Internet data transfer speeds are increasing. WEB 2.0 applications that facilitate participatory information sharing such as social networking sites, blogs, social media, and others are growing in number. Image-based and video sharing websites, such as FLICKR® (Google, Inc.), PICASA® (Google, Inc.), YOUTUBE® (Google, Inc.), etc., are growing in popularity. All of these capabilities and developments are making online content-based image manipulations very useful. Since new visual media is being uploaded to the Internet all the time, ways to efficiently organize, index, and retrieve desired visual media is a constant and ever-growing challenge. Organizing visual media can be an enormous endeavor.
People are often the principal subject matter in visual media, such as photos, images, and video frames. The ability to find visual media of a particular person easily and quickly in a visual media dataset is highly desired. Searching for visual media including a particular person can have many applications. Visual media content is best evaluated visually. However, legacy search tools are often text based, originally designed to return text results, and more recently expanding into applications involving image searches. That is, the search input is limited to text, such as a person's name, a noun, or written description of the visual media being sought. Text-based searching alone can be imprecise with respect to visual media results since, for example, many people can have the same name which can return visual media of many different people. Users aren't typically interested in all results returned in response to a text search query (e.g., images of all people named “Bob Smith”), but rather some portion of returned images such as an image of the “Bob Smith” they know. Therefore, some ordering of visual media search results can be beneficial to a user.